Simplicity

Originally posted on May 5th, 2010

What makes a web page successful? The fact is that, no matter how much space/technology, you have at your disposal. Nothing will sell if the experience isn’t simple, and this especially applies to the web.

A lot of what I’m about to write isn’t new, and goes without saying. However ‘going without saying’ is a part of the problem. Ironically, one of the huge barriers to attaining simplicity is our intellect. We know our product. Our product sells because it is so powerful, has so many uses, and does ‘everything’ when complementing suites. We know this and we want to sell our product based upon ‘what it can do’ for many users. Complicating matters, is the fact that we’re a huge public company which needs to ‘make its numbers’ and so there are a multitude of stakeholders (business units) pushing to promote the features of the products they’re responsible for. We know this. As users we also know what we want in an upgrade. We want to know the stability, fixes, new features of a new product. However as salespeople we’re so in trenched with balancing the desires of stakeholders who are not responsible for each others ‘numbers’. The scary thing is that, in being blind to other products, they’re doing their job. You can’t expect someone from the Flash team to know the InDesign team’s objectives, as much as Adobe needs to care about what Cisco’s objectives are. Sure communication between teams occur from time to time, but what that really comes down to is ‘what can your team do to help us meet our objectives’. Its not ignorance, just the natural consequences being a huge company. Acknowledging this is the first step in breaking the boundaries of complexity.

Referencing ‘Made to Stick’ by Chip and Dan Heath,

“Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know…”

Because we have the ability to capitulate on internal knowledge of our product, we overlook how effective ‘simplicity’ can be when we acknowledge that “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”